Fima (26 page)

"That's enough." Fima smiled wryly. "We have sinned. We have transgressed. That's enough."

When he got off the bus, he muttered like a captious old man: "Wordplay. Empty wordplay." Because suddenly his earlier juggling with the words for "forget" and "dwindle" or "die away" struck him as so cheap that he did not even say thank you or good-bye to the driver as he got off the bus, which he was always very particular about doing, even in moments of absent-mindedness, including yesterday when he inadvertently got off at the wrong stop.

Fima stood in the gray street for a moment or two, among dead leaves and scraps of paper blowing in the wind. He concentrated on the whisper of damp pines behind the stone walls, and he stared at the departing bus. What had he left on the bus? A book? An umbrella? An envelope? Perhaps a small package? Something belonging to Tamar? Or to Annette Tadmor? "Cranes wheel and whirl": a forgotten line from an old children's song suddenly came back to him. He consoled himself with the hope that what he had forgotten on the seat was merely the copy of
Ma'ariv
that he found there. Thanks to the minister and the cranes, he could not even remember the headlines.

I
N THE GARDEN, AS HE WALKED ALONG THE PAVED PATH THAT LED
around the small block of flats to the clinic, he stopped and stood for a moment, because from the second floor, through closed windows, wind, and rustling pine trees, there came the sound of a cello. One of the old women, or perhaps a pupil, was practicing the same scales over and over again.

Fima tried vainly to identify the tune, standing and listening like a man who does not know where he has come from or where he must go. If only he could change his material state at this instant, and become air, or stone, or a crane. A cello was being plucked inside him, answering the cello overhead in its own language, a sound of yearning and self-mockery. He had a mental image of the lives of those three elderly women musicians, who ratded along rain-swept winter roads for hours in a taxi to give a recital in some remote kibbutz at the far end of Upper Galilee or at the opening ceremony of a war veterans' reunion. How did they spend their free evenings in the winter? After washing the dishes and clearing up the kitchen, they probably gathered, the three of them, in their communal room. Fima conjured up the image of a severely puritanical room containing a pendulum clock with the hours marked in Roman characters, a sideboard, a heavy, thick-legged round dining table, and dark straight-backed chairs. A gray woollen poodle crouched on the carpet in a corner of the room. On the closed grand piano, on the table, and on the chest of drawers were spread lace mats, like those that covered every available surface in his father's flat in Rehavia. There was also a heavy, old-fashioned radio set, and blue dried flowers in a tall vase. The curtains were drawn, the shutters closed tight, and a blue flame glowed in the heater, which bubbled faintly from time to time as the kerosene flowed from the reservoir to the wick. One of the women, perhaps each in turn, read softly to the others from an old German novel.
Lotte in Weimar
, for example. There was no sound the whole evening apart from the reader's voice and the ticking of the clock and the bubbling of the heater. At eleven o'clock precisely they got up and went to their respective bedrooms. Their three doors closed behind them until the morning. And in the main room, in the deep silence and the darkness, the clock kept ticking relentlessly, and chiming softly every hour.

At the entrance to the clinic Fima saw the elegant plate inscribed with the words
DR. WAHRHAFTIG DR. EITAN CONSULTANT GYNECOLOGISTS
. As usual, he was irked by the construction that Hebrew did not tolerate.

"So let it not tolerate it. So what?"

And did Nora, Wahrhaftig's only daughter, who had been married to Gad Eitan and had run off ten years ago with a visiting Latin-American poet, ever suffer pangs of nostalgia? Of conscience? Of shame and guilt? Her name was never mentioned here. She was never alluded to, even indirectly. As if she had never existed. Only Tamar occasionally whispered something to Fima about a letter that had been returned to sender, or a telephone hung up without a word. Tamar persisted in trying to persuade him that Gad was not really a bad man but was just frightened and hurt. Except when she occasionally said the exact opposite: Any woman would have left such a viper.

Fima put on his short white coat, sat down behind his reception desk, and looked at the appointments book. As though he was trying to guess which patient was going to materialize in his life as the next Annette Tadmor.

Tamar said:

"There arc two patients inside. The one with Dr. Basso Profundo is a little like Margaret Thatcher; Gad's looks like a schoolgirl, quite pretty."

Fima said:

"I nearly phoned you in the middle of the night. I managed to find your Finnish general, the one who begins and ends with M. It's Mannerheim. He was really called von Mannerheim. A German name. He was the one who amazed the whole world by halting Stalin's invasion in 1938. He led the tiny Finnish army against vastly superior Soviet forces."

Tamar said:

"You know everything. You could have been a university professor. Or a Cabinet minister."

Fima considered this, agreed with her in his heart, and replied warmly:

"You are the ideal woman, Tamar. It's a disgrace to the male sex that nobody has snatched you away from us yet. Though on second thought there isn't a man alive who's worthy of you."

Her stocky, robust body, her soft, fair hair gathered into a small bun at the back, even her one green eye and one brown one suddenly made her look touchingly childlike, and he asked himself why he shouldn't go up to her, clasp her shoulders, and bury her head in his chest as though she were his daughter. But this urge to console was mixed with another: to boast to her that two women had made the pilgrimage to his flat that morning and offered themselves to him, one after the other. He hesitated, pulled himself together, and said nothing. When had a man's hand last touched that stout body? How would she react if he suddenly reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands? With shock? Outrage? Guilty surrender? You fool, he said to his penis: now you remember. And as though he could feel her nipples nestling in the soft center of each palm, he clenched his fists and smiled.

Tamar said:

"Can I ask you something else?"

Fima could not remember what the last question was, but he replied cheerily, expansively, as though aping his father's lordly manner:

"Up to half my kingdom."

"Pacific island, also bathing costume."

"Pardon?"

"That's what it says here. Do you think it's a misprint? 'Pacific island, also bathing costume.' Sue letters. It's almost the last clue left."

"I don't know," said Fima. "Try Tahiti. I've got a child who keeps asking me to take him away to the Pacific. He wants us to build a cabin out of wattles and live on fish and fruit. I don't mean that he's my child exactly. Well, he is and he isn't. Never mind. Try Hawaii. Would you like to come with us, Tamar? To live in a cabin built of wattles and eat nothing but fish and fruit? Far away from cruelty and stupidity? Far away from this rain?"

"Do you spell Tahiti with an I or a Y? Either way it won't help, because the second letter has got to be an I and the third's a K. Do you mean Yael's little boy, Dimi? Your Challenger? Maybe I shouldn't meddle, Fima, but you ought to think carefully whether you're not complicating that child's life too much by trying to be a spare father to him. I sometimes think..."

"Bikini," said Fima. "The swimsuit was named after doomsday. Bikini was a tiny island that was evacuated and blown to bits with atom bombs. It was the testing ground for doomsday. In the South Pacific. We'll have to look for some other island. Some other ocean, in fact. Anyway, how can I make a cabin out of wattles: I can't even put up a bookshelf. Uri Gefen assembled my bookcases for me. Please, Tamar, don't stand at the window like that with your back to me and the room. I've told you a thousand times I can't stand it. My problem, I know."

"What's the matter with you, Fima? You're very funny sometimes. I was only drawing the curtains because Pm fed up with looking at the rain. We don't need to look for any other island: Bikini is just right. What do you think is the name of the ruling party in Nicaragua?"

Fima had the answer to this question on the tip of his tongue, but at that instant the sound of a woman's voice suddenly burst out behind Or. Eitan's closed door. It was a short, piercing scream, full of terror and outrage, the sort of sound that might be wrenched from the throat of a small child who was the victim of searing injustice. Who was being butchered in there? Perhaps someone destined to be Yoezer's father or grandfather. Fima tensed, straining to block his mind, to fortify himself, not to imagine, what those plastic-gloved hands were doing in there, on that couch covered in white oilcloth and a disposable sheet of coarse white paper, with a white trolley nearby carrying a set of sterile scalpels, speculums, different-sized scissors, forceps, syringes, a razor, special needle and thread for sewing human flesh, clamps, oxygen masks, and saline drips. And the femininity exposed to its fullest extent, with no hiding place, flooded with bright light from the powerful lamp behind the doctor's head; pink and raw like a wound, looking like a toothless old man's open mouth, oozing dark blood.

While he was still struggling to banish this image, not to see or hear or feel, Tamar said gently:

"You can relax now. It's all over."

But Fima felt ashamed. Somehow, in a way that was not clear to him, he felt that he himself was not free of guilt. That he too was responsible for the agony going on behind the dosed door. That there was a connection between his humiliation of Annette and then Nina this morning and the pain and shame on that spotless couch which now was no doubt far from spotless, full of blood and other secretions. His penis shrank and retreated like a thief. A vague, repulsive pain suddenly throbbed in his testicles. If Tamar had not been there, he would have reached down to ease the pressure of his trousers. Though actually it was better like this. He must abandon his pathetic attempt to convince Tsvi that we are all entitled to discharge ourselves from responsibility for atrocities committed in our name. We have to admit the guilt. We have to accept that everybody's suffering rests on all our shoulders. The oppression in the Territories, the disgrace of old people poking around in trash cans, the blind man tapping at night in the deserted street, the misery of autistic children in run-down institutions, the killing of the dog with edema, Dimi's ordeal, Annette's and Nina's humiliation, Teddy's loneliness, Uri's endless wanderings, the surgical procedure that had just taken place on the other side of this wall, stainless-steel forceps deep inside the wounded vulva—everything was on all our shoulders. How useless to dream of running away to Moruroa or the Galapagos Islands. Even Bikini, poisoned by a radioactive cloud, was on all our shoulders. For a moment he pondered the curious fact that in Hebrew the word for "pity" appears to be related to "womb," while "forceps" appears to be derived from "learning a lesson." But then he rebuked himself for these verbal games, his poeticizings, which were no less despicable than the minister of defense's saying "cost" when he meant "death."

"There's a stanza in one of Alterman's poems," he said to Tamar, "called 'Songs of the Plagues of Egypt,' that goes like this: The rabble soon assembled / Bearing the noose of blame, / To hang the King and Council / And free themselves from shame. That is more or less the bottom line of all history, I think. It's the story of all of us, condensed into a dozen words. Let's make her a cup of coffee. And one for Gad and Alfred too."

Tamar said:

"That's all right. You're excused. I put the kettle on. Anyway, it'll take her a while to come around and stand up. You're excused from cleaning up too. I'll do it if you just see to the sterilizer and the washing machine. How come you can remember everything by heart? Alterman and Bikini and everything? On the one hand, you're so absent-minded you can't even button your shirt right; on the other hand you turn the world upside down for a clue in a crossword puzzle. And you organize everyone's life for them. Just look at your sweater: half in and half out of your trousers. And your shirt collar's half in and half out too. Like a baby."

At this she fell silent, though her warm smile continued to haunt her broad, open face as though it had been forgotten there. After being absorbed in thought for a while, she added sadly, without explaining the connection:

"My father hanged himself in the Metropole Hotel in Alexandria. It was in 'forty-six. They didn't find any letter. I was five and a half. I hardly remember him. I remember that he smoked cigarettes called Simon Am. And I remember his wristwatch: yellow, square, with phosphorescent hands that glowed in the dark like a ghost's eyes. I have a picture of him in British army uniform, but he doesn't look much like a soldier. He looks so sloppy. And tired. In the picture he actually looks fair-haired, smiling, with beautiful white teeth and lots of lovely little lines at the corners of his eyes. Not sad, just tired. And he's holding a cat. I wonder if he suffered from unrequited love too. My mother would never talk to me about him. The only thing she said was: He didn't think about us either. Then she'd change the subject. She had a lover, a tall Australian captain with a wooden arm and a Russian name, Serafim. They explained to me once that it comes from the Hebrew word 'seraphim.' Then she had a weepy banker who took her to Canada and dropped her. In the end she wrote to me from Toronto in Polish. I had to have the letter translated; she never managed to learn to write Hebrew. She said she wanted to come back to Nes Tsiyona to start a new life. But she never made it. She died of cancer of the liver. I was brought up in an institution run by the Working Women's Council. About Alterman: tell me, Fima, is it true what they say—that he has two wives?"

"He died," Fima replied, "about twenty years ago." He was on the point of launching into a crash course on Alterman when Dr. Eitan's door opened, a pungent hygienic odor wafted out, and the doctor poked his head out and said to Tamar: